The session I was booked in to see was a photoshop session, unfortunately, none of the students showed up, this was not the fault of the staff member I was there to observe, she had invited and confirmed the session with the students. The session was booked by the course tutor for 3rd-year students who they felt needed help with the Photoshop skills.

I have every sympathy for the trainer, I have been in this situation myself. The student’s tutor should have made sure that the students were aware of the importance of the session and made sure that they attended.

Instead of having a session to observe, my colleague sent me a really interesting resource that she had created. The resources were created in SharePoint and were part of a large resource back that has been created in SharePoint for LSF students.

The Resource was a mixture of written text and videos that were embedded on the page using Panopto. The Resource was really well made and very useful.

My Feedback.

My colleague wanted specific feedback related to ways to improve the resource. As I said earlier the resource was of really high quality, easy to follow, informative, and engaging. My feedback was mainly around the formatting and ways to make it more accessible. I suggested the following

• The flow of the session, was it a step by step lesson or a collection of micro lessons? I think that in a fairly large single resource, it’s nice to have a flow to it so that the students know there is a clear starting point and they work through the resource in a step by step manor. Or if the resource is a group of micro sessions, then it needs to be clearly marked as such and the sections need to be easily navigable so that the students can pick the ones they want in the order they want.
• The videos were very clear, but the subtitles needed to be looked at to make sure they were accurate. Giving students subtitles is very important, not only for students with hearing difficulties, but we have a large cohort of foreign students, that are not native English speakers, especially when you are working with difficult concepts and technical activities.
• Making sure that the formatting is accessible, While sometimes staff are restricted by the software or general theme of a online resource, we must ensure that the formatting is correct so that screen readers and translation software can easily work helping students that may have difficulty with the text.
• The resource could also do with either activities bult into it for the students to complete and or short quiz at the end of the chapters/resource to sho that the students have been engaged and they have gained the knowledge that you want them to  get. The resource was quite passive, it would be good to try to engage the students with short little activities for them to try. A quiz at the end shows that the students have gained the knowledge you wanted to get from the resource, it’s also a really useful tool that can be used to make sure that the resource is working correctly. It can highlight area of the resource that may need adapting to help the students to get the most out of it.

References

Fallin, Lee. (2019). Making Learning Development Resources Accessible. 10.13140/RG.2.2.26426.44486. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/333852942_Making_Learning_Development_Resources_Accessible

hospitalityinsights.ehl.edu. (n.d.). From passive to active learning: Pros, cons and 4 strategies. [online] Available at: https://hospitalityinsights.ehl.edu/passive-active-learning.

‌Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/